Bar Chart In Excel 2010

Bar charts in Excel are good at displaying values for different groups for comparison. Let’s look at an example to illustrate how we might use a bar chart.

Yesterday I sat on a bridge and counted how many cars of different colours I saw. Here are the results in a spreadsheet:

Car colour is what is known as an independent variable, and that should go on the left. The car count is the dependent variable.

To add a bar chart representing our data, select the data and then click Insert > Charts > Bar, and select one of the chart types available. Note that if we select the column headings as well as the data itself, the headings will appear on the graph.

I chose a 3-D bar chart and created this:

You can see that the way that our data is represented allows to make visual comparisons very easily.

The counts I made above were all in the morning. I had my lunch and returned to the bridge to resume my counting. Adding the new results to the spreadsheet, we now get data involving two independent variables:

Plotting this data in a bar chart now gives us:

Now we can compare the counts for different colours of cars, and we can see how those differences vary from morning to the afternoon.

Let’s try and make the graph a little more appealing by changing the formatting. Maybe a dark blue would look better on the bars that represent the PM counts. We need to select the “Count (PM)” bars and there are two ways of doing this: we can either click on the bar itself in the graph, or we can use the Chart Element selector in the Current Selection group (Format tab in Chart Tools).